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  • Annotated CSA Mandelzoom loader worm

    From Tom Stepleton@21:1/5 to All on Thu Sep 29 17:00:17 2022
    I've carried out a close reading of the "worm" in the CSA Mandelzoom source code: this is the code that distributes itself across a Transputer network and then loads and executes programs distributed to it by a host computer. The worm itself is not
    specific to Mandelzoom --- you could use it to load other programs if you wanted to.

    The network initialisation and worm code are in three files, executed in this order:
    SRESET.TAL -- reset the Transputer network
    FLBOOT.TAL -- main worm and bootstrap loader
    FLLOAD.TAL -- full loader for larger programs

    I've annotated these source files with a play-by-play of what the worm is doing. The annotated files are found at the gist link below, regrettably in the opposite order to what's listed above:

    https://gist.github.com/stepleton/e0181ecd11ade19124a2956da614caab

    I hope this might be of interest to the rare enthusiast out there,
    --Tom

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From James Wilson@21:1/5 to Tom Stepleton on Sun Feb 26 09:57:04 2023
    On Friday, 30 September 2022 at 01:00:20 UTC+1, Tom Stepleton wrote:
    I've carried out a close reading of the "worm" in the CSA Mandelzoom source code: this is the code that distributes itself across a Transputer network and then loads and executes programs distributed to it by a host computer. The worm itself is not
    specific to Mandelzoom --- you could use it to load other programs if you wanted to.

    The network initialisation and worm code are in three files, executed in this order:
    SRESET.TAL -- reset the Transputer network
    FLBOOT.TAL -- main worm and bootstrap loader
    FLLOAD.TAL -- full loader for larger programs

    I've annotated these source files with a play-by-play of what the worm is doing. The annotated files are found at the gist link below, regrettably in the opposite order to what's listed above:

    https://gist.github.com/stepleton/e0181ecd11ade19124a2956da614caab

    I hope this might be of interest to the rare enthusiast out there,
    --Tom

    Hi Tom I also had to work through the loader a few years back to make it work on a large T425 network. That network has some buffering on specific sets of links which broke the original code so it's also had a major rework! See https://github.com/
    machineroom/T-Mandel

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)